Power-up design. – August Demirsson

The game me and my group picked was Umibozu. In the last couple of days, we have made some great progress with the game. We finished some core mechanics, such as player/enemy movement, shooting, death conditions for both the enemies as well as the player, and one power-up. In this text, I will go through the thought-process behind designing one of the power-ups in this game.

The power-up that we designed for the alpha build was a rapid-fire power-up, a power up that makes the player shoot faster. the reload time on the weapon used in the game is normally 3 seconds. A small bar left to the weapon gets filled up which indicates how far through the reload time the player is. For example, after you have shot a bullet the bar will appear empty and slowly start filling with a red colour that then turns to green when the bar is about to be filled, to indicate that the reload time is about to be over. Once the bar is filled the player can shoot a bullet.

We thought that the reload time was reasonable, as the game will not be that challenging at all. Although, it could feel nice being able to spam your shoot key, feeling like Rambo, for a short period of time. So, we implemented a power-up that reduces the reload time to 0.5 seconds for approximately 7 seconds. While the power-up is active the weapon changes colour to show the player that something happened to the weapon, making the player press the shoot button to see what happened, then the reload bar timer will appear and fill up a lot quicker, indicating faster reload.
This also meant that our programmer that is fairly new to programming did not have to add a ton of code into the game, just tweak some numbers when the player picks up the power-up. We felt like it was more important to make a working product than an out of the box game, thus the simple power-up.

As for our second power-up (not yet fully decided), we are thinking of implementing a triple barrel weapon that makes your weapon shoot 3 bullets at a time, instead of only a single one. That way you can make some exciting plays where you kill 2-3 enemies in one shot, which would feel amazing. This is probably not either the most unique power-up but something our coder can implement.

That is our thought behind the design of our power-ups. Feel free to give me us some feedback!

About August Demirsson

2017 Game Design

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